When a user conducts an information inquiry in an information inquiry search engine system, after the user inputs the inquiry conditions, the information inquiry system at the backend extracts the inquiry results matching the inquiry conditions, and presents the inquiry results which are sorted in a specific way to the user. The user may select the satisfactory information from the inquiry results which are presented and arranged in a certain order.
While sorting the inquiry results, the information inquiry system usually considers the timeliness of each inquiry result based on relevancy. In other words, the inquiry results are categorized into different relevancy levels based on their relevancy values, and then sorted in a top-down manner based on the relevancy levels. In the same relevancy level, the inquiry results are sorted based on the publishing time. The earlier the inquiry result is published, the higher its rank is.
Take the sorting of products in an information inquiry system of an e-commerce website as an example. After the information inquiry system extracts the product information matching the user's inquiry conditions from the database, it considers the timeliness of each product's information based on the ground of relevancy. Within the same relevancy level, the later the product's information is published, the higher its rank is.
However, some suppliers of the products re-publish the products' information repeatedly every day in order to make the ranking of their products' information higher under the current sorting techniques. Such massive repeated publication of information consume massive amounts of technical resources such as bandwidth, database, servers, etc. In addition, the publishing time oriented sorting induces malicious competition among suppliers and finally damages the user experience.